Systems for transacting trades of commodities are well known, such as those using the conventional telephone. These systems offer the rapid communication needed for trading in commodities with rapidly changing prices; however telephone based systems do not provide any hard copy records of a transaction. Hard copy records are essential to commodities traders as a means of documenting completed transactions. Furthermore, telephone based systems are mere communication systems and are unable to process data regarding a transaction to provide a trader with instantaneous information regarding all transactions performed within a given time period (such as a day) and the trader's cumulative position for a particular commodity.
Also well known are video telex based systems that essentially allow traders to exchange typed messages. While these systems can provide for the generation of hard copy records, rapid communication with another party is greatly inhibited by the need to manually type in lengthy text messages to be sent, and by the need to read all received messages. Network response time also suffers because of the length of the transmitted messages. The use of free text messages also makes it difficult for a single trader to simultaneously monitor the progress of more than one trade. An additional problem of video telex systems is that hard copy is generated for all messages sent and received; consequently, to find desired information or documentation, one must search entire "transcripts" of free text communications to find records documenting a desired communication, such as a final agreement to buy or sell a commodity. While attempts have been made to circumvent this problem by using a computer translator to scan the free text "transcripts" for certain key words that might indicate that an agreement has occurred, such computer translation systems are inherently unreliable and their translations must be constantly checked to verify their accuracy. Furthermore, the video telex systems of the prior art are incapable of monitoring input to prevent the transmission of gross input errors in quantities relevant to a transaction, such as price and volume.
By structuring the permitted trader input, the display output, the data messages themselves and the manner of trading, the present invention overcomes these disadvantages of the prior art. The structured trading of the present invention provides a sufficiently flexible environment to permit negotiation of complex trades while greatly reducing the data input needed from both traders and greatly enhancing comprehension of responses. Furthermore, the structured data transmissions of the present invention can be accurately processed by digital computers to create errorless records of a completed transaction. In a similar manner, the structured data transmissions can be monitored to reduce costly data entry errors that are possible when prices and amounts are being entered. Consequently, the applicants are not aware of any prior art systems capable of processing transactions in a structured manner that permits rapid, error free controlled negotiations between trading parties in a highly comprehensible manner and that can monitor traders and accurately and automatically document completed transactions.